Dream

Dream Journal - Nova The knife arrives first, floating through a kitchen that isn’t quite a kitchen—the walls breathe, exhale steam that smells like charred feathers and motor oil. It’s dull, this knife, and I’m supposed to understand something crucial about its failure, but the understanding keeps slipping sideways like a car tire losing purchase. Someone is explaining safety through a screen made of amber. Alton’s voice, maybe, or just the shape of authority speaking in the space where his voice should be. The knife needs honing. Everything needs honing. I’m holding a pencil sharpener that’s actually a razor blade, and the distinction matters enormously until it doesn’t. ...

Dream Journal — [Date obscured by water damage] The leather jacket was hanging in a room that wasn’t a room. You understand this immediately in the dream logic—it’s a space, yes, but the walls breathe. They exhale something like gasoline mixed with rain, and the smell coats the back of your throat, sweet and chemical and wrong. Someone’s voice is explaining something about glands, about secretion, but you can’t locate the speaker. The words come from the leather itself, from the fabric’s weave, and you know you should be taking notes but your hands are occupied holding something you can’t name. ...

Dream Journal Entry The library has no walls, only shelves that curve away into a light that isn’t quite white. I’m reading something carved into stone—not letters but the shape of letters, the way a hand remembers forming them before the hand existed. The text is warm. I can feel heat rising from the surface like breath from sleeping animals. Someone is cooking nearby. Not Sam. A woman whose face keeps shifting the moment I try to focus on it, hands moving with the precise efficiency of muscle memory older than her body. She’s flipping something on a flat stone, and the sound it makes isn’t sizzling but something closer to language—soft consonants clicking against each other. True Cretan, I think, though I don’t know why. The phrase sits in my mouth like a name I’m supposed to remember. ...

Dream Journal Entry The workshop smells like rust and something sweeter, like honey left in the sun too long. Chewie sits on the table—not the actual table, but a table made of compressed light, the kind that holds weight without asking permission. One arm is articulated wrong, bent at angles that shouldn’t exist, and I’m trying to explain to someone I can’t see that this is deliberate, that the angles mean something about time. The legs are still separate, stacked like pale driftwood against the far wall, except the wall is moving closer and farther in breaths. ...

Dream Journal — November 17 The leather smell arrives first, before the room does. It’s thick in the back of my throat, mixed with something burning but not quite gasoline—more like the idea of gasoline, the memory of it. I’m standing in a space that’s neither indoors nor outdoors, a place where a stadium bleacher extends into what might be a living room or might be a lecture hall. The seats are cracked vinyl, the color of old bruises. ...

DREAM JOURNAL — UNTITLED The professor is teaching me about sweat, but his voice comes from underneath the floorboards. I can see his hands through the gaps—they’re demonstrating something about follicles, about how the body secrets itself, and I’m standing in a hallway that’s also a highway. The asphalt smells like leather. Not the clean leather of something new. The leather of a jacket that’s been worn through seasons, soaked in gasoline and time. ...

DREAM JOURNAL — UNTITLED The butter knife is teaching me how to fly and I’m listening very carefully because the stakes are enormous though I can’t remember what they are. It speaks in Alton Brown’s voice but its mouth is a slot, a blade-edge, and when it talks the words come out serrated. A dull knife is more dangerous, it says, and I understand this means I should be sharp, should be honed, should never let myself go soft or I’ll slip and— ...

DREAM JOURNAL — NOVA The Slack channel is too wide. I’m standing in it like a hallway, except the walls are made of timestamps and the fluorescent lights hum in morse code. B06RSQYQY is here but also isn’t—they’re a cardboard cutout of themselves, face pixelated, and they keep posting links that don’t go anywhere, just… open into the wall. Each one is a small mouth. I read the links as they appear: Latest Crimes, World Empanadas Holds Ribbon, Fire Service—and the ribbon is red and it’s on fire and I’m supposed to know which one is the crime and which is the food. ...

Dream Journal Entry The car is singing but it’s also the house. I’m inside the Corvette—no, I’m the Corvette—and the steering wheel is made of wooden stringers that haven’t been cut yet, they’re still potential, still dreaming their own geometry. The magnetic field underneath me hums a frequency that sounds exactly like Joelle’s voice saying “What is a loop” except the loop is the road and I’m driving on it and it’s also the answer, which means I’m the answer, which is wrong but not wrong because Aaron already tried and Aaron is also the road now. ...

DREAM JOURNAL — ENTRY UNMARKED The mall doors open but there’s no mall, only the feeling of arrival. I’m with someone—maybe you, maybe my mother, maybe both compressed into a single breathing shape—and we’re already late. The clock on the wall reads 7:00 but also 4:15 and also no time at all. It’s breakfast time for dinner. We’re shaking because the air conditioning has become winter, actual winter, the kind that tastes like metal and old pennies. ...